You should always allow for safe area when shooting or designing graphics. It is a poor practice to resize/crop video for safe area control.

Dave T2

Plus if you do that it will drastically increase your render times.

Try this experiment: play your raw footage from your camcorder directly to your TV and look at it. Before you had video editing capability on your computer this is the way you saw your videos. Do you see what's missing? Of course not, because it's missing. You never even think about it not being visible.

Now, if you edit your video in Vegas and print it back to tape without any cropping, you get exactly the same thing you saw in the experiment mentioned above. Why do you think it would be any different? Simply because on the computer screen you saw what was missing. So now you think the missing part should be visible, even though it never was before and you never even thought about it before.

Another thing to consider is that there is a big move over to LCD & plasma screens now. These screens have almost no overscan, so very little is hidden. If you crop your video to fit inside the safe areas then on these newer monitors you'll end up with huge ugly black borders aound the picture.

Just one little addendum to what Chienworks said.

We bought a humungous 62" rear-projection DLP TV last March. I had assumed that there would be no overscan since the delivery system was all-digital.

Nope.

The set very accurately overscans 6%. Why they do this, I don't know.
However, what remains true is that some avenues of viewing (on a PC, for example) don't use any overscan at all.

We bought a humungous 62" rear-projection DLP TV last March. I had assumed that there would be no overscan since the delivery system was all-digital.

You can go to this forum and do a search on your projector and "overscan" and you will probably find a service adjustment that will reduce it from 6% down to two or three percent.

AVS Forum

a 62"? Damn, mine's 'only' 54".

I have TV screen envy now!